Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [193]
“It was in Berlin. That’s where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment – it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid’s room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash. I know, because I saw it – I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin – the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt’s. The buildings all around were newer, they’d been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.
“I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and I went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened I said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around – I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent’s old-fashioned – and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn’t stay long. I really couldn’t stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows … they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story.”
Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. “A bad story,” she prompts.
“Yes,” says Zenia. “It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn’t, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us – that’s how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents’ apartment; she was taking them some bread she’d baked. She went up the stairs as usual – there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it – but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there – my aunt knew her only by sight – this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. ‘Don’t go in, don’t try to go in there,’ she said. ‘They’ve been taken away.’
“ ‘Taken, where?’ said my aunt. She didn’t ask who by, she didn’t need to ask that.
“ ‘Don’t try to find out,’ said the woman. ‘Better not.’ She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she’d looked out the window and she’d seen them coming along the street, and then when they’d turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she’d guessed where they were headed and she’d run out the back door, the maid’s door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl – the balconies at the back adjoined one another – and she’d pounded at this woman’s kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she’d had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can’t just step back and let it fall to the ground.
“I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it’s something my aunt brought with her. See –” Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot.